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When Germany fell, not only did Rothschild agents draft the treaty, prepare the idea of the League of Nations, but Max Rothschild was one of 11 men who took control over Bavaria. Max Rothschild was a Freemason in Lodge No. 11, Munich, Germany.

Victor Rothschild, who worked for J.P. Morgan & Co., and was an important part of MI5 (British Intelligence). Victor Rothschild was also a communist and member of the Apostles Club at Cambridge.45 Lord Rothschild was one of the original members of Rhode’s Round Table group which developed into the CFR. It was the Rothschilds who had financed Cecil Rhodes, beginning in Africa. The Rothschilds’ have several agents which their money got started and who still serve them well, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers were Marrano Jews. The original Rockefeller made his money selling narcotics, (they weren’t illegal then). After acquiring a little capital he branched out in oil. But it was the Rothschild capital that made the Rockefeller’s so powerful. "They also financed the activities of Edward Harriman (railroads) and Andrew Carnegie Steel."(46)

While Americans are robbed at the gas pump, Exxon Mobil will this week report a 60% increase in its quarterly net profits to a cool $10 billion. Royal Dutch/Shell will report a 30% increase.

In 1975 British writer Anthony Sampson penned The Seven Sisters, bestowing a collective name on a shadowy oil cartel, which throughout its history has sought to eliminate competitors and control the world’s oil resource. Sampson’s “Seven Sisters” name came from independent Italian oil man Enrico Mattei.

In the 1960’s Mattei began negotiating with Algeria, Libya and other nationalistic OPEC states who wanted to sell their oil internationally without having to deal with the Seven Sisters. Algeria had a long history of defying Big Oil and was once ruled by President Houari Boumedienne, one of the great Arab socialist leaders of all time, who initiated the original ideas for a more just “New International Economic Order” in fiery speeches at the UN, where he encouraged producer cartels modeled on OPEC as a means to Third World emancipation.

In 1962 Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash. Former French intelligence agent Thyraud de Vosjoli says French intelligence was involved. William McHale of Time magazine, who covered Mattei’s attempt to break the Big Oil cartel, also died under strange circumstances.

A tidal wave of mergers at the turn of the millennium transformed Sampson’s Seven Sisters – Royal Dutch/Shell, British Petroleum, Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco and Gulf – into a more tightly controlled cartel which, in my book Big Oil & Their Bankers…, I term the Four Horsemen: Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell.

By the late 1800’s John D. Rockefeller had become popularly known as “the Illumination Merchant” during a time when oil was powering the reading lamps of every American household. Rockefeller figured out that it was the refining of oil into various end products and not actual crude production which held the key to control of the industry.

By 1895 his Standard Oil Company owned 95% of all refineries in the US while expanding operations overseas. Summing up his attitude towards his new oil monopoly, Rockefeller once stated, “The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism is gone never to return”.

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust began illuminating the New World with funding from Kuhn Loeb and Rothschild banking families. While the Rockefellers worked the American side of the energy matrix, the Rothschilds consolidated their control over Old World oil resources.

By 1892 Shell Oil, under the direction of Marcus Samuel, began shipping South Sea crude through the new Suez Canal to supply Europe’s factories. Shell took its name from the abundance of seashells which lined the shores of the Dutch-controlled archipelago that is now Indonesia. The Samuel family controls London’s biggest merchant bank Hill Samuel, along with the trading house Samuel Montagu.

In 1903 the Swedish Nobel and the French Rothschild’s Far East Trading – financed by King Wilhelm III – combined with Samuel and Oppenheimer’s Shell Oil to form the Asiatic Petroleum Company.

In 1927 Royal Dutch Petroleum discovered oil at Seria off the coast of Brunei, whose Sultan would become the world’s richest man as a result of his loyalty to Royal Dutch. The Dutch and British monarchs who control Royal Dutch merged their company with the Oppenheimer and Samuel’s Shell Oil and Nobel and Rothschild’s Far East Trading and Royal Dutch/Shell was born. Queen Beatrix of the Dutch House of Orange and Lord Victor Rothschild are its two largest shareholders.

In 1872 Baron Julius du Reuter was granted his 50-year concession in Iran. In 1914 the British government took control of his Anglo-Persian Company and renamed it Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, then BP. Britain’s House of Windsor controls a large stake in BP Amoco while the Kuwaiti monarchy owns 9.5%.

In 1906 the US government ordered the dissolution of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, charging that Standard violated the new Sherman Anti-Trust Act. On May 15, 1911 the US Supreme Court declared, “Seven men and a corporate machine have conspired against their fellow citizens. For the safety of the Republic we now decree that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15th”.

But the breakup of Standard Oil along state lines only served to increase the wealth of the Rockefeller family, who retained 25% interest in each new company. Soon the new companies began to reintegrate.

The new Standard Oil of New York merged with Vacuum Oil to form Socony-Vacuum, which became Mobil in 1966. Standard Oil of Indiana joined with Standard Oil of Nebraska and Standard Oil of Kansas and in 1985 became Amoco. In 1972 Standard Oil of New Jersey became Exxon. In 1984 Standard Oil of California joined with Standard Oil Kentucky to become Chevron. Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio) retained the Standard brand until it was bought by BP, which also bought trust-baby Atlantic Richfield (ARCO). Thus the Rockefellers came to own a large chunk of BP.

By 1920 Exxon, BP and Royal Dutch/Shell dominated the world’s booming oil business, with the Rockefeller, Rothschild, Samuel, Nobel and Oppenheimer families, along with British and Dutch royals owning the brunt of their stock. Two other Rockefeller babies, Mobil and Chevron, weren’t far behind the Big Three. The Texas Murchison family – themselves patronized by the Rockefellers – controlled Texaco, while the Mellon family – with its own ties to the Rockefeller fortune – controlled Seventh Sister Gulf Oil.

The first known attempt by the Seven Sisters to stifle competition came in 1928 when Sir John Cadman of British Petroleum, Sir Henry Deterding of Royal Dutch/Shell, Walter Teagle of Exxon and William Mellon of Gulf met at Cadman’s castle near Achnacarry, Scotland. Here an agreement was reached that would divide up the world’s oil reserves and markets.

The Achnacarry Agreement became known to oil industry insiders as the As Is Agreement because its aim was to maintain a status quo under which the Seven Sisters controlled the world’s oil through market share agreements, sharing of refining and storage facilities, and by agreeing to limit production to keep prices high.

Big Oil signed three more agreements in the next six years. The 1930 Memorandum of Understanding for European Markets was followed by the 1932 Heads of Agreement for Distribution and the 1934 Draft Memorandum of Principles.

Between 1931 and 1933 the Four Horsemen ruthlessly cut the price for East Texas crude from $.98/barrel to $.10/barrel. Many Texas wildcatters were run out of business. Those that remained were forced to agree to strict production quotas under threat of ruin by the majors – quotas that still exist to this day. It is these quotas, not “the environmentalists” (as the reactionary right claims) that serve to keep the US dependent on Persian Gulf oil, where Big Oil dominates the game.

By taking the oil industry international – which requires billions in capital – the Four Horsemen keep independent challenges to their hegemony at bay. They also put thousands of US oil workers out of jobs in Texas and Louisiana.

John D. Rockefeller himself did not control crude reserves. Instead he invested heavily in refining and cut deals with the Morgan-controlled railroads to cut his shipping costs. Texas wildcatters had to pay much more to ship their oil. They possessed neither the esoteric knowledge of refining crude, nor the capital to build expensive refineries. All their money was tied up in drilling rigs, which were not cheap either.

Today the Rockefeller family fortune is even more heavily invested in downstream oil operations such as petrochemicals and plastics, as well as in industries that are dependent on oil such as banking, aerospace and automobiles.

In the 1980’s long-time Chase Manhattan chairman David Rockefeller invested $35 billion in Singapore, which has since become an important refining and storage center. Royal Dutch/Shell’s largest single refinery is at Pulau Bukom, Singapore. In 1991, as the Asian Tigers began to roar, Exxon Mobil introduced unleaded gas to Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. It produces it at its giant Jurong refinery in Singapore.

The Four Horsemen have followed the money downstream. They are the world’s largest refiners and marketers of crude oil in all of its various end-product forms. RoyalDutch/Shell is both the leading marketer and refiner of crude oil and is currently the source of one in ten barrels of refined product in the world. Its bottom line has benefited greatly from this downstream move with the firm showing record profits starting in 1988 and many years since. Seventy-seven percent of Shell profits now come from petrochemicals.

Shell also owns the world’s largest refinery complex on the Netherlands Antilles island of Aruba, just off the Venezuelan coast. In 1991 Shell sold an outdated refinery on the neighboring island of Curacao while upgrading its Aruba facilities. The completion of this massive complex caused Venezuelan crude to become much more important to global oil supply. Crude from African nations like Nigeria and Angola is also refined at the Shell Aruba facility, which sits next to a hulking Exxon Mobil refinery named Lago, after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, from where most Venezuelan crude is derived.

Royal Dutch/Shell is currently focused on development of natural gas markets, investing heavily in Middle Distillate Synthesis (MDS) plants that convert liquefied natural gas to high-grade liquid products. By 1996 they had built MDS facilities in Malaysia, Nigeria and Norway. In 1993 Shell joined with Mitsubishi and Exxon Mobil in a $3 billion natural gas project in Venezuela and launched a $1.1 billion petrochemical expansion in Brazil. That same year BP Amoco discovered huge oilfields in neighboring Columbia.

By 1969 Exxon owned 67 oil refineries in 37 countries. Over 60% of Exxon’s 1991 profits came from downstream operations. In the first quarter of that year alone, Exxon made a $2.4 billion profit, the highest quarterly profit since Rockefeller founded Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1882. It was no coincidence that the Gulf War was being prosecuted during this time, with Exxon meeting much of the demand generated by the US military and its allies.

In the early 1990’s Exxon bought the plastics division of Allied Signal and entered joint ventures with both Dow and Monsanto in the thermoplastic elastomer realm. According to Exxon Mobil’s 2001 10K filing to the SEC, the company netted $17 billion in year 2000. From 2003-2006, during the US occupation of Iraq, the company regularly broke its own record for biggest quarterly profit by any corporation in US history.

Recently the Four Horsemen have been swimming back upstream, becoming the top four retailers of gas in the US. They own every major pipeline in the world and the vast majority of oil tankers. Royal Dutch/Shell has 114 ships in its armada. Recently the company added seven giant liquefied natural gas tankers. Shell has 133,000 employees worldwide and in 1991, boasted assets of $105 billion. Shell’s Bullwinkle oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico is taller than the world’s highest building.

Exxon Mobil leads the way in producing lubricant base stocks and its scientists invented butyl rubber. It has operations in 200 countries and is the only firm that operates in the harsh Beaufort Sea, where it built 19 islands of steel to drill from. Exxon owns most of the land in Yemen (5.6 million acres), Oman and Chad. Its 1991 assets totaled $87 billion.

The latest wave of mergers in the oil industry began in the early 1960’s. Eight of the top twenty-five oil companies in 1960 had merged by 1970. Exxon bought Monterey Oil and Honolulu Oil. Chevron scooped up Standard Oil of Kentucky. Atlantic Oil merged with Richfield Refining to form ARCO, which then gobbled up Sinclair. Marathon Oil bought Plymouth Refining.

In 1985 Shell bought Occidental Petroleum’s Columbian interests. In 1988 it took over Tenneco’s assets in that country. The 1990’s saw Amoco (Standard Oil of IN) hitching its wagons to BP to form BP Amoco. In 1999 BP Amoco bought ARCO, giving the company 72% ownership of the Alaskan Pipeline.

Exxon bought Texaco Canada and Mexico’s Compania General de Lubricantes in 1991. Conoco was purchased by DuPont. In March 1997, Texaco and RD/Shell merged their US refining operations.

The final and most dramatic wave of consolidation saw Exxon merge with Mobil in November 1999. That same year Chevron bought Thailand’s Rutherford-Moran Oil and Argentina’s Petrolera Argentina San Jorge. In July 2000 Chevron merged its petrochemical business with that of Phillips to form Chevron Phillips Chemical Company. That same year Chevron tied the knot with Texaco.

On August 30, 2002 Conoco’s merger with Phillips Petroleum was approved creating Conoco Phillips, which in 2005 bought coal titan Burlington Resources. In 2002 Royal Dutch/Shell bought up previously merged Pennzoil/Quaker State as well as Britain’s biggest remaining independent oil company – Enterprise Oil. In 2005 Chevron Texaco bought Unocal. And Four Horsemen rode on.

The Four Horsemen have interlocking directorates with the international mega-banks. Exxon Mobil shares board members with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Prudential. Chevron Texaco has interlocks with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase. BP Amoco shares directors with JP Morgan Chase. RD/Shell has ties with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, N. M. Rothschild & Sons and Bank of England.

Former Citibank chairman Walter Shipley sat on Exxon Mobil’s board, as did Wayne Calloway of Citigroup and Allen Murray of JP Morgan Chase. Willard Butcher of Chase sat on the board of Chevron Texaco. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan came from Morgan Guaranty Trust and served on the board of Mobil. BP Amoco director Lewis Preston went on to become president of the World Bank.

Other BP Amoco directors have included Sir Eric Drake, the #2 man at the world’s largest port operator P&O Nedlloyd and a director at Hudson Bay Company and Kleinwort Benson. William Johnston Keswick, whose family controls Hong Kong powerhouse Jardine Matheson, also sat on the board of BP Amoco. Keswick’s son is a director at HSBC. The Hong Kong connection is even stronger at RD/Shell.

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster sat on the boards of RD/Shell, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, Rio Tinto and Inchcape. Cathay Pacific Airlines owner and HSBC insider Sir John Swire was a director at Shell, as was Sir Peter Orr, who joins Armstrong on Inchape’s board. Shell director Sir Peter Baxendell joins Armstrong on the board of Rio Tinto, while Shell’s Sir Robert Clark sits on the board of the Bank of England.

As a result of the deregulation craze in the US companies no longer have to report their top shareholders to the SEC. According to 1993 10K reports filed by the Four Horsemen, the Rothschild, Rockefeller and Warburg banking combines still control Big Oil. The Rockefellers exert control through New York mega-banks and Banker’s Trust, which in 1999 was purchased by Warburg-controlled Deutsche Bank in its bid to become the largest bank in the world.

As of 1993 Banker’s Trust was #1 shareholder in Exxon. Chemical Bank was #4 and J.P. Morgan was #5. Both are now part of JP Morgan Chase. Banker’s Trust was also leading shareholder at Mobil. BP listed Morgan Guaranty as its biggest owner in 1993, while Amoco listed Banker’s Trust as its #2 shareholder. Chevron listed Banker’s Trust as its #5 shareholder, while Texaco listed J.P. Morgan as its #4 owner and Banker’s Trust as #9.

Thus, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase – the banks of Warburg and Rockefeller – have increased shares in Exxon Mobil, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco. Rothschild-controlled Bank of America and Wells Fargo exert West Coast control over Big Oil, while Mellon Bank also remains a big player. Wells Fargo and Mellon Bank were both top 10 shareholders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco and BP Amoco as of 1993.

Information on RD/Shell is harder to obtain since they are registered in the UK and Holland and are not required to file 10K reports. It is 60% owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum of Holland and 40% owned by Shell Trading & Transport of the UK. The company has only 14,000 stockholders and few directors. The consensus from researchers is that Royal Dutch/Shell is still controlled by the Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Nobel and Samuel families along with the British House of Windsor and the Dutch House of Orange.

Queen Beatrix of the Dutch House of Orange and Lord Victor Rothschild are the two largest shareholders of RD/Shell. Queen Beatix’ mother Juliana was once the richest woman in the world and a patroness of the right-wing occult movement. Prince Bernhard, who married Juliana in 1937, was a member of the Hitler Youth Movement, the Nazi SS and an employee of Nazi combine I. G. Farben. He sits on the boards of over 300 European companies and founded the Bilderbergers.

When you’re being robbed, it’s always a good idea to be able to identify the perp. Now if only we could get the cops to bring em’ in…

Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is atwww.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

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God and His Messiah Jesus Christ our Lord - our right and duty to witness to Him: World War One: "Through the assistance of Jack Philby, Allen Dulles, a former president of the CFR, who would later head the CIA, then working for the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, helped the Rockefeller oil companies gain Saudi Arabia, which would be the world’s single greatest oil resource, accounting for nearly half of total oil production.[28] In 1933, the Saudis granted oil concessions to California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), affiliate of Standard Oil of California, (Socal, today’s Chevron), headed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., of the Round Table, and a founding members of the CFR.

In 1936, Socal and the Texas Oil Company had created a partnership, which would later be named Aramco, or the Arabian-American Oil Company. To Socal and Texaco were added the Standard of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum, the predecessors of Exxon Mobil. The Aramco partners, along with British Petroleum (BP), Royal Dutch Shell, and Gulf Oil combined as a cartel to control the price of oil, known collectively as the Seven Sisters. With the Saudi royal family, they controlled the world’s largest source of petroleum."

Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah). Before 1971, the UAE was known as the TrucialStates or Trucial Oman. That was since the creation of those emirates out of local Sheikdoms by the British in 1892. The TrucialStates and Qatarand Bahrain were put together in the political form they became with what became known as the Seven Sisters Oil companies behind it. Three were part of the same one at that time – that was Standard Oil (Rockefeller) – Esso, Mobil and Chevron; the other four were 1) British Petroleum {originally called Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) – This later became Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC)} 2) Royal Dutch Shell – and added a little later were 3) Gulf 4) Texaco. In stages in 1899, 1922 and 1961, Kuwait was unlawfully split off from Iraq by the British in order to pinion Iraq.

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"the cartel is De Beers, and De Beers is the Oppenheimers -- as is the Anglo American Corporation, South Africa's dominant conglomerate"

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: A Diamond Cartel May Be Forever; The Hereditary Leader of De Beers Pursues Post-Apartheid Growth

Periodically, the death rattles of the cartel, which sets prices for most of the world's uncut diamonds, are said to be heard. In 1905, it was synthetic diamonds. In 1942, Roosevelt's anger. In 1960, Russian finds. In 1977, Israeli hoarding. In 1983, Australian finds and Zaire's defection.

Each time, the cartel outwitted fate. While OPEC has withered and the tin cartel collapsed, diamonds have glittered on.

It has different names, but the cartel is De Beers, and De Beers is the Oppenheimers -- as is the Anglo American Corporation, South Africa's dominant conglomerate. In a silicon world, diamonds and gold aren't quite what they used to be, but the Oppenheimers are still the richest of their countrymen and the most important business figures in this country.

Now the third generation is officially in charge. Nicholas Frank Oppenheimer, 53 -- also known as Nicky, or N.F.O., or the Cuban because of his beard -- became chairman of De Beers a year ago and in November opened its new headquarters, outside the Anglo American complex downtown.

It is not an easy time. Last month, the company announced that because of falling Asian demand, it sold fewer diamonds than it had for 12 years, a mere $3.4 billion worth. The mines are cutting back; the executives admit to sleepless nights. But not to panic. This has happened before.

In company lore, Mr. Oppenheimer's grandfather, Sir Ernest, was the daring entrepreneur; his father, Harry, the philosopher king, and Nicky is -- well, something different. ''Man of action'' is the take on him, but it seems silly.

He is a genial teddy bear who wears funny socks and is relaxed enough to be photographed pounding an African drum with miners at a company ceremony. At the same time, he is the helmsman who negotiates billion-dollar deals with the Russians, who insist on dealing with a family member.

''It's much nicer to be known as Mr. Nice Guy than Mr. Nasty Guy,'' he jokes. ''But you've got to have lines -- and when you hit the line, that's the end of the story, nice guy or not.''

In London, where he spends half his time, Mr. Oppenheimer commutes by helicopter, which he pilots. In South Africa, he has his own cricket team and personal stadium, his ''grand folly,'' he says. In return for a $17,000-a-match donation to youth cricket, his team gets the first match with visiting national teams -- if the New York Yankees played cricket and toured, in South Africa, they would have to take on the Nicky Oppenheimer XI first. There are even statuettes of him inside his stadium, but they're not imperial -- they're goofy, like souvenir salt shakers.

Asked why he has his own team, he explains in his typically self-deprecating way, ''If you're as bad a cricketer as I am, it's the only way you get to play.''

In public, Mr. Oppenheimer is modest and often pokes fun at himself. His obligatory military service in the 1960's, he said, was spent as second-in-command of a parking lot near Pretoria, signing vehicles in and out. ''The army taught me to sign my name very quickly, and that's stood me in good stead the rest of my life.''

And he takes umbrage at an old report that as a student, he drove a beat-up little car with a ''Jesus Saves'' bumper sticker. ''Small, yes. Not ''Jesus Saves,' but something like that,'' he said. ''But never beat-up. Never. I take great offense at the idea that I didn't look after my car.''

His own personality is in stark contrast to the ruthless reputation of the cartel's Central Selling Organization in London, which estimates that 70 percent of the world's rough diamonds are bought through it. (The figure was once nearly 100 percent, but Australia's output, Russia's excess gems, stolen stones and many that slip out of war-torn Africa find their own way to cutters.)

The C.S.O. is still capable of freezing out diamond dealers who cross it. And as the biggest buyer of diamonds throughout Africa, it is still the ultimate source of funds, whether wittingly or not, for some of the world's most vile killers who control diamond mines, including rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone. But Nicky Oppenheimer has brought glasnost to the business, running the C.S.O. since 1985 in a way very unlike that of his uncle Phillip, who was an icy and inflexible figure. He is, for example, not afraid to admit that diamonds are intrinsically worthless ''except for the deep psychological need they fill'' -- a need that hundreds of millions of dollars in De Beers's ''A Diamond Is Forever'' advertising helps create.

Nor does he mind calling a cartel a cartel, though he prefers to refer to it as ''single-channel marketing.''

And he views with wry amusement the fact that he cannot visit the United States, by far the company's biggest market, because of a legacy of unresolved antitrust cases stretching back decades. He has been there in the past to ski and to see relatives in San Francisco, but since an indictment charging De Beers with fixing the prices of industrial diamonds was handed up more than four years ago, no De Beers director will enter the United States for fear of being subpoenaed.

Of American antitrust laws, he says: ''Obviously I'm biased, but I don't think in this case they are sensible. It's a strange thing -- here I am a believer in free enterprise and competition, all the good liberal values, and yet I'm chairman of a business which talks ultimately about single-channel marketing, control, all those sort of things.''

Mr. Oppenheimer says he leads ''a very normal life,'' driving his own car, feeling no need for bodyguards, going out to movies or stores unpestered by paparazzi.

''If you live that life, if you go to the places where people take pictures of you, then you have your picture taken, I suppose,'' he says. ''I'm not sure I necessarily go to the right places. Thank goodness.''

At the moment, he is focused on the reorganization of the De Beers-Anglo-Minorco consortium. Anglo, one of the world's biggest mining companies in gold, platinum and other minerals, is absorbing Minorco, a Luxembourg subsidiary created to evade anti-apartheid sanctions. The resulting company, Anglo American P.L.C., will move its headquarters and stock exchange listing to London from Johannesburg, to give it access to more capital.

Mr. Oppenheimer denies what some analysts say -- that the move to London is also a way for Anglo to improve its image in the United States, where it now owns two gold mines, with an eye toward going deeper into that market.

As a result of the reorganization, hundreds of De Beers workers on the Anglo payroll are being shifted back to De Beers. And De Beers has moved its head office out of Anglo's downtown headquarters to a south Johannesburg amusement park.

But the cross-ownership between De Beers and Anglo is not being undone, nor is the Oppenheimer stake in both, Mr. Oppenheimer says. De Beers still owns roughly 40 percent of Anglo, essentially as a cash cow and as collateral for the billions it must borrow to get through bad diamond years. To keep diamond prices ever rising gently, De Beers must buy and hold raw stones. When jewelry demand sinks that is expensive.

Mr. Oppenheimer says it is ''clearly rubbish'' that the family controls both De Beers and Anglo because it ''directly owns'' only 8 percent of Anglo. But that has been the family line for decades. He is also the nonexecutive deputy chairman of Anglo, while his son Jonathan, 27, is rising through the Anglo ranks in Zimbabwe.

Nicky Oppenheimer's father, Harry, now retired after leading the companies from 1957 to 1994, celebrated his 90th birthday last year. He spends hours in his library, some of them reading Byron, but still goes into the office most mornings.

Harry was a member of Parliament for nine years, a critic of apartheid and later a force behind liberal parties and newspapers. Sir Ernest, Nicky's grandfather, also served in Parliament and got into furious fights with the Government during the Depression, threatening to close his mines if it kept threatening to nationalize them.

In later years, the company was often criticized by anti-apartheid leaders for growing rich on underpaid migrant labor enforced by the apartheid system. It apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in November 1997 for ''many missed opportunities and many mistakes made in Anglo's corporate citizenship,'' including failing to house workers with their families, to desegregate workplaces and to promote blacks. In its defense, it pleaded that the apartheid Government forbade it to do so.

While professing no interest in politics, Nicky enjoys good relations with the new Government. He is on the board of Nelson Mandela's Children's Fund and he signed the deals that arranged for black ownership of substantial portions of two Anglo subsidiaries, Johnnic and J.C.I.

''There were many years in the 1980's, when there was absolutely no contact between Anglo and De Beers and the Government of the day,'' he says. ''We never saw them, never talked. And that's really weird. With the present Government, things have finally become normal. One feels the Government is doing what it should in supporting business endeavors, and that's extremely healthy.''

What, he is asked, would he like to be remembered for?

''Oh, I always find questions like that terribly difficult,'' he says. ''One doesn't necessarily have a mission. I don't know -- for being fair and reasonable, I suppose.''

It's a trick question, he is told. He was asked it by someone else 15 years before and his answer was noted.

He smiles. ''What was it?''

''For not being boring. For having lived a worthwhile life. For having been polite to people all one's life.''

''Hmm,'' he says. ''Sounds rather boring, if you ask me.''

Correction: January 28, 1999, Thursday A picture of Nicholas Oppenheimer, chairman of the De Beers diamond company, in Business Day on Jan. 12 carried an erroneous credit. Jon Hrusa made the photograph for The Sunday Times of Johannesburg, not for The New York Times.

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Out of Africa — via Teddy Roosevelt, a circus and Francisco I. Madero

The early colonial settlement of South Africa, by the Dutch puritans and religious exiles known as the Boers or Afrikaners wasn’t all that different from that of the English colonies in what became the United States. The descendants of both colonists saw themselves as the rightful (and righteous) possessors of their territory. While the later apartheid regime was odious, it was a simply a 20th century (and more efficient) codification of the same attempt to maintain a tradition after the trauma to the prevailing ethos that was seen in the United States after the American Civil War in the “Jim Crow laws”.

Viljoen during the Boer War

Both the First and Second Boer Wars were modern wars, the only difference being that the British invaders made no secret of their intentions to seize control of the regions’ mineral assets. The Second Boer War is noted today for its um…er… social innovations. Fighting an asymmetrical war against an indigenous (or indigenized) population, the British invented a new euphemism and new form of control — the “concentration camp” –for dealing with the locals. Secondly, to dispose of the military and political leadership — or potential leadership — the British pioneered the use of indefinite detention on far away islands, out of sight, and — in those pre-internet (and pre-television, and pre-radio and pre-wire service reports) days, out of mind.

By this time, the United States had, of course, become an emerging world power, and had changed dramatically, although the “original families” still largely set the prevailing social and political standards. Naturally, as fellow puritans, as republicans who had resisted colonialism (and as fellow “white men” who took up their burden) there was a good deal of sympathy and support for the Afrikaner Republics in their hopeless fight against the might of the British Empire.

Being a world power, there were restrictions on what the United States would commit itself to, and — as a new colonial power itself — it was not going to intervene politically or militarily for the Orange Free State or the Transvaal Republic. However, the elites, and much of the press, and the people of the United States, were sympathetic to the Boer cause.

When, at the end of the war, one of the stalwarts of the Transvaal forces, and a pioneer in another innovation of that war, the modern commando army, General Benjamin Johannes Viljoen was released from prison on the Isle of Saint Helena (where Napoleon was also isolated), there was nothing much for him to come home to. Before the way, Viljoen had been a dirt farmer, during the war, an expert on asymetical warfare, and afterwards, an exile in need of a job.

Viljoen wasn’t the only Afrikaner exile. A number of “enemy combatants” had been held in Bermuda, and like some of their carceral descendants today (to coin a phrase) in Guantanamo, could not be returned to their homeland for political reasons. Where to send them? Why Mexico, of course!

The early 20th century was the heyday of “white” settlement in northern Mexico. Porfirio Diaz’ cientificoshad, in keeping with the Social Darwinist theories of the time, assumed that European (or European-descended) immigrants would, simply on the basis of their bloodlines, improve the stock in the largely undeveloped north. So…

Exiles from the “detention centers” in Bermuda, led by Wilhelm Snyman (who was allowed to leave Bermuda for the United States) were offered a chance to buy undeveloped properties in Mexico at cut-rate prices. The Mexican government was willing not just to take the Afrikaners, but to assist them in founding an exile colony. But, the Mexican government only had so much money available and the Boers were expected to pay something for the land. And these guys were broke.

In April 1901, Snyman met with then U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was not only an heir to the original puritan elites, he was from a Dutch puritan family. Officially (Snyman and Roosevelt met at Roosevelt’s home on Long Island, New York), the President could not over-annoy the British with assistance to what the Crown saw as terrorists, but, unofficially, there was much he could do. General Viljoen had already scoped out suitable land in New Mexico, but found the price much too high. Roosevelt contacted Porfirio Diaz about resettlement and arranged for the South Africans to meet with Mexican Secretary of the Treasury José Ives Limantour.

Limantour took the Afrikaners on a … well… Liman-tour, by Pullman coach on a government train to look at several sites, After rejecting the Yaqui Valley of Sonora (which would need repopulating, as the Yaqui were being sent to their own concentration camps in the Yucatan), the Boers found what they wanted near Carmargo, Chihuahua. Fifty thousand pesos for the 33,615 square hectares of the ex-Hacienda de Santa Rosalia was a steal.

Or, would be if the Snymans could come up with the cash. Roosevelt, a successful author himself as well as a sometime military man quietly pulled a few strings among his fellow New York elites to guarantee Benjamin Viljoen’s My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War and An Exiled General would have respectable reviews and decent sales.

And TR had some interest in African slaughters, too!

Furthermore, Roosevelt — who seemed to embody every American myth of his time — had been a wild west rancher and law man back in the day — was no snob when it came to raising money. And enough of a showman to recognize that the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows of recent fame still had their audience. So, Viljoen and several other South Africans, joined by a collection of footloose British veterans of the conflict, mounted the Boer War Circus at the 1904 Saint Louis Exhibition to raise the last of the necessary funds for the Chihuahua colony. Viljoen himself, though, made enough from these enterprises to buy the land he’d previously seen in New Mexico, which apparently he liked well enough to leave his first wife back in South Africa and pick up a new bride in the Mesilla Valley.

The Snyman colony — Hacienda Humboldt — managed to hold on, although its isolation (roads were slow in reaching the colonists) made it hard to attract new blood. The Afrikaners were relatively quick to realize that the labor practices acceptable back in Africa with regard the “natives” weren’t going to fly in Mexico and quick to adjust, there were very few social problems with their neighbors. Apartheid wasn’t in the colony’s future… just the opposite. Willingness to socialize began the decline of the specifically Boer nature of the enterprise, as Snyman’s sons and other younger members of the colony quickly married into local families.

Adopting their neighbor’s political and social views — and sensing that Limantour had forgotten about them — even the unassimilated colonists were on the side of the Revolution. And one of their own — ex-General Viljoen was, in some ways, leading the troops.

Francisco I. Madero may have been an “idealist” and more than slightly eccentric, but his family were good, hard-headed business people with their own elitist, born-to-rule sensibilities. When the Maderos decided on Revolution, they didn’t just shop for guns, but for proper advisers and agents. And went shopping for experienced experts on asymmetrical warfare too. They knew of, and about, the Boer War veterans colony, and were keen followers of trends in the United States. Viljoen — whose motto in the Boer War was “God and Mauser Rifles Will Prevail” was offered the job as chief-of-staff to the Madero Provisional Government.

Although the Revolution was successful, in that Porfirio left power and Madero was elected to the Presidency, Viljoen was never an important enough figure in the Revolution to be more than a footnote.

From the beginning there were problems. Giving orders to people like Pancho Villa was always problematic, more so when the Chief-of-Staff doesn’t speak Spanish, and Villa’s English was never as good as he thought. Villa usually did what he wanted, and just claimed he hadn’t been able to understand Viljoen. Viljoen, being a commando expert himself, was wise enough to figure that as long as Villa was winning, he wasn’t going to worry too much about it, facing bigger problems with Pascual Orozco, another loose cannon, and a more immediate danger. Orozco was suspected in May 1911 of attempting to bribe Viljoen to switch sides, and — by June of that year, was openly defiant of the Chief of Staff (Viljoen wanted to move troops to the Baja, while Orozco was threatening to overrun Ciudad Juarez).

Villa and Orozco, besides able to communicate directly with their troops, also knew the countryside intimately — which Viljoen didn’t. And, his war having been in a country without railroads, and fought outside the few cities, had little relevance to the Mexican Revolutionaries, who recognized the strategic importance of the rail lines, and where even rural residents resided in towns, not on individual farms. Increasingly ignored, and distrusted by many because of his status as what was basically a foreign mercenary, Viljoet stayed on as Chief of Staff, but more as a theorist (and one that could be ignored) and media spokesman (his English was much better than most of the other Generals) than a key figure. He left the Mexican army when Madero was overthrown, returning to New Mexico to take up an active role in local politics in the new U.S. state. He died in 1917.

Hacienda Humboldt slowly disintegrated. Ironically, resolving the colonist’s original complaint sealed its demise. With access to the outside world, people left, most simply assimilating into the larger Mexican community. The more conservative Boers, looking for a South African community resettled near Viljoens in the Mesilla Valley, although during the Great Depression, most eventually moved elsewhere. Today, Hacienda Humbolt is part of Ejido Julimes, with under 300 residents, none of whom would be identified as Afrikaner.

Plaza Julimes (Hacienda Humboldt) today. Photo: "Kekox" Panoramio.com

Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen’s La colonización bóer en Chihuahua y el suroeste de Estados Unidos, 1903-1917 can be downloaded in PDF for those seeking a scholarly study of the Afrikaner colonies. Viljoen’s 1903 My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War is available on-line from Project Gutenburg)

The American Civil War Intelligence Overseas – The Freemasons were heavily involved in all of it

Intelligence Overseas At the beginning of the war, when the Union announced a blockade of Southern ports, leaders of the Confederacy believed that the blockade could be broken by pressure from Britain and France. The plan was to withhold cotton from the textile mills of those nations, forcing them to aid the Confederacy by convincing the Union to lift the blockade. But the French and British textile mills had huge stockpiles of cotton and did not face an immediate shortage from the Southern embargo.

North and South turned to diplomacy to advance their interests. Slavery was abhorred in both France and Britain. Neither nation could openly support the Confederacy. But, strategically, both nations liked the idea of a United States weakened by a crack-up of the Union. And Britain especially did not side with the North because of the hostile policy of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who threatened to declare war on the British if they intervened.

The South wanted Britain and France to recognize the sovereignty of the Confederate States of America. Union diplomats hoped to keep Britain from recognizing or intervening in any way. More than diplomacy was involved. Confederate and Union agents in Britain and France were fighting a secret war over the South’s clandestine operations aimed at buying arms and building warships.

The North’s blockade of Southern ports had inspired the Confederacy’s diplomatic efforts in London and Paris. Southern strategists realized that the Confederacy could not survive on whatever just happened to trickle into the South from swift ships whose bold captains slipped through the blockade. The South decided that to break the blockade, the Confederacy needed to build a navy that could attack the Union warships, sink Northern merchantmen, and protect friendly commercial ships running guns and other supplies to the South.

Lacking adequate shipyards, Confederate officials sent agents to Britain and France to arrange for the shipbuilding and the arms purchases. Covert operations were needed because British law prohibited the arming of private ships in British yards. In the fall of 1861, the Confederacy’s Department of State launched the plan on a diplomatic level by naming two representatives: former U.S. Senator James M. Mason of Virginia was to go to Britain and former Senator John Slidell of Louisiana to France. Officially, the two envoys were empowered to negotiate treaties with their respective countries. Their clandestine mission was the obtaining of warships and arms.

Mason and Slidell were put on a ship that got through the blockade at Charleston and sailed via Nassau to Havana. The two new diplomats had no notion of security. A Cuban newspaper published their itinerary. This bit of open-source intelligence was read in another Cuban port by Captain Charles Wilkes, the commanding officer of the U.S.S. San Jacinto.

Mason and Slidell sailed from Havana on board the Trent, a British mail packet. The San Jacinto lay in wait and stopped the Trent with a shot across her bow. After a tense standoff, Wilkes snatched Mason and Slidell off the Trent, put them aboard the San Jacinto, and triumphantly sailed to Boston, where the two envoys were imprisoned. Britain reacted violently, ordering 10,000 troops to Canada, ostensibly for its protection against the United States. The crisis ended when the Lincoln administration convinced the British that Wilkes had acted on his own. Mason and Slidell were soon on their way across the Atlantic again.

Mason, though aware of covert Confederate activity in England, restricted himself to diplomacy. Slidell, however, became involved in setting up illicit arms deals and hiring propaganda agents for a campaign to counteract European sentiments against slavery and the Confederacy. One agent found seven “writers on the daily London press” who were willing to accept what was discreetly called “partial employment.” Besides the payoffs, the journalists got Havana cigars and American whiskey. An agent in France had a $25,000 “secret service fund” to be used to sponsor newspaper articles that “may be useful in enlightening public opinion.”

The propaganda fund paid for the publishing of 125,000 copies of a pro-slavery tract by “the Clergy of the Confederate States of America.” Some copies were stitched into religious publications, one of which was strongly against slavery. Propaganda agents also produced placards showing the Confederate and British flags intertwined and placed them in “every available space in the streets of London.” Henry Hotze, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, was an undercover Confederate operative who wrote pro-South articles for British newspapers and founded Index, A Weekly Journal of Politics, Literature, and News, which appeared to be a British publication. Hotze hired British journalists and syndicated their pro-Confederate articles to dozens of British and European publications—and to Northern newspapers. Hotze’s journal kept publishing until five months after the war ended.

Hotze mingled with key British politicians, including William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who made pro-Confederacy speeches. Hotze also worked with other Confederate agents to stage a peace rally calling for the ending of the war on Southern terms.

The Confederate secret service, which ran the Secret Line courier service between Union territory and Richmond, extended the service to reach England and France. The courier service was set up by George N. Sanders, a former journalist and political operator with connections in the North, the South, and Europe. Union agents, aware of Sanders’ sympathies, kept eliminate him under surveillance. A surveillance report notes his landing in Liverpool “in a great hurry” and describes him as “a man of small stature with black whiskers under his chin” who “no doubt is a bearer of dispatches from the insurgents.”

Henry SheltonSanford

Henry SheltonSanford

Records of the Secret Service Fund refer to the extended Secret Line as the “Postal Route to Richmond.” The route ran from England to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then to coastal pickup points on Chesapeake Bay, where Secret Line couriers were given the dispatches and got them to the Confederate capital. Agents in Europe used a special cipher for such correspondence.

The South had to invent a European intelligence presence. The North possessed a ready made, though amateur, intelligence network in the form of U.S. ambassadors and consuls. Thomas Haines Dudley, the U.S. consul in Liverpool, ran the network in Britain. He had a natural talent for espionage. A Quaker, Dudley once disguised himself as a slave trader in a scheme to purchase back fugitive slaves kidnapped in the North. Working with Dudley were Henry Shelton Sanford, minister to Belgium, and Freeman Harlow Morse, U. S. consul in London. Sanford believed in sabotage and rigorous intelligence gathering. Sanford paid more attention to Confederates in Britain than to matters in Belgium. Like Dudley, Sanford engaged British detectives as agents and saw no reason not to gather information “through a pretty mistress or a spying landlord.” Sanford bribed factory clerks to tell him what Confederate purchasing agents were paying for ordered supplies. “I go on the doctrine that in war as in love everything is fair that will lead to success,” Sanford wrote.

Fearing that Sanford’s rash approach would produce another U.S.-British crisis, the Lincoln administration reined him in. In a message that praised him for his “active and intelligence services for detecting traitorous proceedings,” he was ordered to turn over those duties to Morse and go back to being just a minister to Belgium.

Morse hired a former detective of the London police, who set up surveillance posts in London and Liverpool and got daily reports from his detectives. Among other actions, they bribed postal workers to obtain the addresses on letters sent and received by Confederate agents. The Union detectives also managed to intercept Confederate telegrams.

The chief target of surveillance was James Dunwody Bulloch, a former U.S. Navy officer (and three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle). Bulloch had launched the Confederate shipbuilding operation in June 1861 when he found a Liverpool shipyard whose owner agreed to build a ship to Bulloch’s specifications. As he later explained, “The contract was made with me as a private person, nothing whatever being said about the ultimate destination of the ship….” Bulloch named her the Oreto and sent her off to Nassau with a Confederate captain and crew.

The U.S. consul in Nassau, apparently tipped off by American agents in England, went into court to charge that the ship was a Confederate warship, in violation of British law. The court ruled that no law was broken because the Oreto was unarmed.

She then sailed to a coral isle some 75 miles south of Nassau. There she rendezvoused with an arms-filled ship dispatched by Bulloch. Quickly armed and renamed the Florida, she set sail. After a delay caused by an outbreak of yellow fever aboard, she headed for Mobile, Alabama. Because of a bungled installation, her guns could not fire when she initially encountered Union warships. She got away, though badly damaged. Once repaired, the Florida survived to ravage Union shipping. In the two years before she was captured, she seized or destroyed more than 30 American ships.

Dudley was determined to keep Bulloch’s next ship from going to sea. The ship, known in the yard simply as “290,” was nearly ready to sail in July 1862 when Bulloch’s agents realized that Dudley had gathered enough intelligence to go to court with a legal claim against the shipyard for violating British neutrality laws.

Bulloch hastily arranged what appeared to be a leisurely sail down the River Mersey, complete with several women and men seemingly out for the day. Suddenly, a tugboat appeared alongside the ship, the passengers were disembarked, and the 290 became the cruiser Alabama, bound for the Azores, where she would take on guns, ammunition, and supplies.

Bulloch appeared to have outwitted Dudley. But Bulloch did not know that Dudley had planted an agent on the Alabama. The agent, paymaster Clarence Yonge, left the ship in Jamaica, returned to England, and added his knowledge to Dudley’s legal case against the clandestine Confederate operations. In an affidavit, Yonge noted that the shipyard had equipped the supposedly commercial ship with sockets in her decks and other fixtures for guns, along with powder tins, and accommodations for a 100-man crew.

The Alabama was the Confederate’s most successful raider. She captured or destroyed more than 60 ships with a total value of nearly $6 million before a Union warship ended her career. While she was destroying the U.S. commercial fleet, Dudley was using his evidence to deprive the Confederacy of two additional warships ordered by Bulloch. Dudley argued that the ships—two ironclads with metal underwater rams jutting from their hulls to rip holes in a foe’s wooden hull—were obviously warships. And he warned that if British officials allowed them to go to sea, the decision would be considered an act of war against the United States.

Dudley was awaiting the British decision when he received a report from the U.S. consul in Cardiff, Wales: a French ship had arrived in Cardiff carrying men who carelessly talked about being crewmen for the rams, as the warships were called. The consul noted that the men boarded a train for Liverpool. Surveillance of the Liverpool shipyard showed that one of the ironclads was almost completed; a Frenchman, not Bulloch, claimed ownership. In October 1863, as a ram was about to sail, the British government seized both rams; the British government later bought them.

The State Department’s intelligence work in Europe produced another coup in June 1864 when the U.S. minister to France learned that the Alabama was in Cherbourg for repairs. The minister passed the information in a telegram to the captain of the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which was in a Dutch port. The Kearsarge sailed to Cherbourg, stood off outside the territorial limit, and waited for the Alabama. In a two-hour battle watched by 15,000 spectators ashore and at sea, the guns of the Kearsarge sank the Alabama.

By then, there was little hope that either France or Britain would recognize the Confederacy. In February 1864, reporting to the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Bulloch had written, “The spies of the United States are numerous, active, and unscrupulous. They invade the privacy of families, tamper with the confidential clerks of merchants, and have succeeded in converting a portion of the police of this Kingdom into secret agents of the United States….” There was, he said, “no hope of getting the ships out.”

Shipbuilder of the Confederacy

James Bulloch

Georgia-born James Dunwody Bulloch was the eldest brother of Mittie Bulloch, Theodore Roosevelt’s mother. Bulloch, who joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman in 1839, rose only to the rank of lieutenant and quit after 14 years because no further promotion seemed likely. He became master of a coastal steamer carrying mail and passengers between New Orleans and New York.

When the Civil War began, Bulloch volunteered for service in the Confederacy and was sent to Liverpool to secretly arrange the building of blockade runners. He arrived in England on June 4, 1861. His first British contact was a Liverpool cotton merchant whose firm had a branch in Charleston, South Carolina. Within three days after his arrival, Bulloch negotiated a contract for building the first Confederate blockade cruiser. On paper, the ship was named the Oreto and was owned by a Liverpool agent of an Italian company.

Another ship built during Bulloch’s covert operation was the Alabama. His younger brother, Irving Bulloch, later served on the ship. Legend makes him the sailor who fired the last shot when the Alabama was sinking after her duel with the Union’s Kearsarge. Irving later joined the crew of the raider Shenandoah, which circumnavigated the globe in search of Yankee prey.

After the war, Bulloch remained in Liverpool, where he lived with his daughter and son-in law. He remained connected with maritime activities and became director of the LiverpoolNauticalCollege. In 1883, he published his memoirs, “The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe” or “How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped.” He lived to see his nephew become Vice President, but died in Liverpool in January 1901, eight months before Theodore Roosevelt became President following the assassination of President McKinley.

Pride of the Confederate Navy

The Alabama

In August 1862, the Alabama left Liverpool, bound for war and fame under the command of Captain Raphael Semmes. She captured and burned U.S. ships in the North Atlantic and the West Indies, then sailed for the Texas coast, where she continued her voyage of destruction. Her most famous feat was the sinking Pride of the Confederate Navy of the U.S.S. Hatteras, a steel-hulled, side-wheeled warship. After a stop in Cape Town, South Africa, the Alabama spent six months in the East Indies chasing and sinking U.S. ships. She destroyed seven more ships before going around the Cape again on a voyage to Cherbourg, France, for overhaul.

In her final duel, on June 19, 1864, the U.S.S. Kearsarge sank the Alabama. A British yachtsman picked up Semmes and 41 others and took them to England. Semmes soon returned to Virginia, where he commanded the James River Squadron and, after the fall of Richmond, rallied his sailors as infantrymen and fought on.

The two youngest U.S. Presidents at the time they became president were Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Roosevelt was 42 and Kennedy was 43 years old upon becoming president. However, Kennedy was the youngest elected president. Roosevelt succeeded President McKinley following McKinley's assassination in Buffalo, New York in 1901. Roosevelt was 46 years old when he was elected president for the first time in 1904.

Theodore Roosevelt was probably the most energetic U.S. president of all the presidents up to that time. He did not like to be depicted as fitting in a niche. To become a U.S. president you clearly must be a politician. But he was much more. He was a conversationalist, a historian, a naturalist, an art patron, a rancher, an advocate of social order and justice, an advocate of food and drug safety, a trust buster, an advocate of management-labor negotiation, an advocate of democratic politics including women's suffrage and a world peacemaker for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In other words he was a leader without peers. And by being all of the above he set a model for future American presidents. Unfortunately not many followed his example.

Theodore Roosevelt became president on September 14, 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York while visiting the Pan American Exhibition. Roosevelt was only 42 years old at the time of the assassination. He became the 26th US president, the youngest ever and since then. Interestingly, his inauguration took place in the State [New York] in which he was born on October 27, 1858, where he served as a New York State Assembly Man from 1881 to 1884, and where he served as a New York State Governor from 1897 to 1898. At the time of his inauguration he had only been a vice-president for six months, so as a result he would serve nearly a full first term. He was re-elected to another full term in 1904, and decided that it would be his final term, a decision he later clearly regretted.

The major areas where he left an impact during his presidency were conservation, the arts and history, order and social justice, foreign policy, including peace making, trust busting and food and safety legislation.

In the area of conservation he provided federal protection for nearly 230 million acres equivalent to almost 360,000 square miles, an area 600 miles long and 600 miles wide. This area came to include 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 4 national game preserves and 21 reclamation projects.

Other areas where Roosevelt stood out were as a patron of the arts, as one of the founding members of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, as the founding member of the Long Island Bird Club, as president of the American Historical Association, and as a naturalist. He led two major international expeditions to Africa and South America to collect information, data and artifacts for American museums. As a result of the above activities he was recognized as a historian, a naturalist and a man of letters. He was also interested in collegiate sports and founded the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

His platform in the 1912 presidential election, on the Bull Moose Party ticket, consisted of the democratization of American politics, reversal of judicial decisions by popular vote, direct election of U.S. Senators, women suffrage, and direct popular vote on legislation. Earlier as U.S. President he supported labor-management negotiations through his donation of $40,000 to a foundation which supported labor-management relations. Many of his platform proposals were subsequently adopted by the Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt Administrations.

In the foreign policy area he was exemplary. He was able to defuse the Russian-Japanese war in the Far East, for which he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During his nearly eight years as president not a single member of the U.S. forces died in combat. He expanded the U.S. Navy and had the Navy conduct a world tour from 1907 to 1909 to show case and demonstrate U.S. sea power. He was the driving force behind the building of the Panama Canal and the establishment of the Canal Zone in Panama which allowed the building of the Canal. Unfortunately he used strong arm tactics to accomplish the Canal Treaty for which he received a considerable amount of criticism.

Roosevelt was a major trustbuster. Although he was not anti-business at all, he felt that the large railroad, bank and oil trusts had too much power which enabled them to fix prices and control markets. He instituted more than 30 court cases, mostly successful, against corporations. He also forced the coal mine operators to negotiate with the mine workers. The Hepburn Railroad Act and the Elkins Act also strengthened the enforcement power of the Interstate Commerce Commission in its control over the railroads.

The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were established in 1906. Both acts established new standards and provided protection and safety in the consumption of food and the use of drugs. Consumer Protection was needed and overdue.

Unlike his fellow Dutch-American President, Martin Van Buren who was born in an apartment above a tavern and was the son of a tavern keeper, Roosevelt was born in an affluent family in New York City on October 2, 1858. The Roosevelt family lived in a house on East Twentieth Street built by Theodore's grandfather. His parents were Theodore Roosevelt [1831-1878] and Martha Bulloch [1834-1884]. Both of his parents died at relatively young ages. His paternal grandparents were Cornelius Van Schaick Roosevelt [1794-1871] and Margaret Barnhill [1759-1861]. The family's wealth came apparently largely from land ownership.

Roosevelt was able to attend Harvard University and earned his A.B. degree in 1880. He then went to Columbia University's School of Law, but only stayed for one year. The reason of why he left is unclear, but he probably had a taste for politics even then. The same year he left Law School he became a New York State Assembly Man and served from 1881 to 1884. From 1889 to 1895 he was the U.S. Civil Service Commissioner. In 1895 he became the president of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners. Two years later, in 1897, he became an Assistant Secretary of the Navy and served in that position until 1898. He served as Governor of New York State from 1899 to 1901, whereupon he became a Vice President of the United States in the McKinley Administration.

Roosevelt married his first wife, Alice Hatheway Lee, on his birthday, October 27, 1880, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Alice died in childbirth in 1884, on the same day Roosevelt learned of his mother's death. Fortunately, the baby survived and Alice Lee Roosevelt [1884-1980] became Theodore's first child. As a devoted family man the two deaths were a major shock, and he retreated to a ranch in Wyoming where he stayed for two years. In 1886 he returned to run for mayor of New York City, but he lost. That same year he also traveled to London, England to marry his second wife, a childhood friend, Edith Kermit Carow on December 2, 1886. Edith would bear him five children consisting of Theodore Roosevelt Jr. [1887-1944], Kermit Roosevelt [1889-1943], Ethel Carow Roosevelt [1891-1977], Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt [1894-1979], and Quentin Roosevelt [1897-1918].

Theodore Roosevelt had two sisters and a brother. They were Anne Roosevelt [1855-1931], Corinne Roosevelt [1861-1933] and Elliott Roosevelt [1860-1894]. Elliott was the father of Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Theodore Roosevelt passed away on January 6, 1919 at his Sagamore Hill Estate in Oyster Bay, New York. There are many sites across the country that commemorate the most unusual and most energetic president this country has ever had. The sites consist of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic site in New York City, the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, New York, The Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, and the Theodore Roosevelt Island in McLean, Virginia.

The Roosevelts, Theodore, Franklin Delano and Eleanor, were all descendants of Claes Martenszen Van Rosevelt [?-1658] and Jannetje Toms [?-1660], who were both part of the original contingent of Dutch immigrants who settled in New Amsterdam in the 1640's. Their grandsons, Jacobus Roosevelt [1692-1776] and Johannes Roosevelt [1689-1750], became the forefathers of the two Roosevelt clans that produced our Roosevelt presidents. The Jacobus branch was called the Hyde Park branch, and the Johannes branch represented the Oyster Bay branch.

Theodore Roosevelt was the great great great grandson of Johannes Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt was the great great great grandson of Jacobus Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was the niece of Theodore Roosevelt. She was thus the fifth cousin of Franklin Roosevelt once removed.